THE CARE

OF

THE DEAD

London:
Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd.
1916.

I.

In a graveyard west of Vimy there are buried 1,320 French soldiers and more than 600 English. The earth is bare on most of the English graves; the French ones are older, but all are cared for alike by the Englishman now in charge of the place. "We leave you our trenches and our dead," a French officer said to an English one when our army took over this part of the line, and both parts of the trust are discharged with a will.

What this means for the French, one feels when one sees the visits of French soldiers' friends to their graves. The other day a French woman in deep mourning came here with a handful of white flowers to place upon one of these. Probably it was her son's, for she was not young. While she was arranging them at its head, there came into the cemetery one of the usual little bareheaded processions—a N.C.O. showing the way; then an English chaplain with his open book; then, on a stretcher, the body sewn up in a brown army blanket, a big Union Jack lying over it; then half a dozen privates looking as Englishmen do at these moments—a little awkward, but simply and sincerely sorry. As they passed the French woman she rose and then, evidently moved by some impulse which shyness made it difficult to follow, fell in at the rear of the procession, with some of the flowers still in her hand. When I next saw them, the men were standing round the new grave, the chaplain was reading aloud, "dust to dust" and "ashes to ashes," and the woman, a few yards away, was kneeling on the ground. The service over, and the rest turning away, she came close to the grave, dropped the white flowers in, and went back to the other grave empty handed.

One knew, though the woman could not, how all this would be told to the dead Englishman's comrades; and one felt the truth of Sir Douglas Haig's saying, that a kind of work which "does not directly contribute to the successful termination of the war" may still "have an extraordinary moral value to the troops in the field, as well as to the relatives and friends of the dead at home." But for the work of the Army's Graves Registration Units, this little scene and many other scenes equally binding, in their degree, to the friendship of England and France could scarcely have taken place. After the French Army had left this district, the French soldier's grave might not have been taken care of, perhaps could not have been even known to be his; the Englishman might have been buried under cover of night in some vacant space near the firing-trench, and all trace of the grave blown away next day by a shell. To know the full worth of what these units are doing now, one needs to see first what the state of things was in the first months of the war.

In those days a man was commonly buried close to the place where he fell. Wherever hard fighting had been, in France or Belgium, the eye of the traveller along the roads is struck by many low crosses sticking out of the ground—in the fields, in cottage gardens, in corners of farmyards and orchards, even on roadside strips of grass. Where the ground has changed hands a good deal in the course of the war, you may see, within a few hundred yards of each other, the gabled and eaved cross of the Germans, with "Hier ruht in Gott" and a name painted white on a dark ground, the beaded wire wreath of